'McCain Didn't Vet Palin' Meme Has Serious Holes

In its "HuffPost Reporting From DC" section, Stein breathlessly reported that McCain's people hadn't even read the local paper in Palin's hometown:

McCain Camp Didn't Search Palin's Hometown Paper Archives

On Saturday, a Democrat tasked with opposition research contacted the Huffington Post with this piece of information: as of this weekend, the McCain campaign had not gone through old newspaper articles from the Valley Frontiersman, Palin's hometown newspaper.

How does he know? The paper's (massive) archives are not online. And when he went to research past content, he was told he was the first to inquire.

"No one else had requested access before," said the source. "It's unbelievable. We were the only people to do that, which means the McCain camp didn't."

The Frontiersman did not immediately confirm the revelation. ...

If true, the failure of the Arizona Republican to access the newspaper clippings becomes another in a growing list of revelations that calls into question just how and why he made his decision to choose Palin.

Some readers have noted that the Frontiersman website includes a small archive of stories about Palin. However, as our original source informed us, and a second Democratic researcher with access to the same records confirms, there have been hundreds of stories on Palin by the Frontiersman dating back over 15 years, only a handful of which are posted online.

Geez, Sam. I searched the Frontiersman's archives tonight, and I didn't have to get on a flight to Alaska to do so. As a matter of fact, I didn't have to leave my chair.

Unless the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman over a holiday weekend, made their archive accessible in the less than 36 hours between the appearance of Stein's report and my writing this column, Sam Stein is absolutely wrong. There's over 10 years of archived information available on Sarah Palin in hundreds of articles.

Again barring sudden archive accessibility, Stein either failed to check the story given by his "source" (too good to check?), or he has a shocking inability to navigate the Internet.

If one types "Valley Frontiersman" in quotes into a normal Google web search, here is what comes back listed first:

If you click on the "Archives" link in the search result, you land here:

As I did in the pic capture above, if you enter "Palin" as your search term, "01/01/1996" as your start date, and "09-02-2008" as your end date, "Oldest First," "Full Article," and the results per page to 100, you'll get this:

Shazam! There are "hundreds of stories" going back over a decade.

Further, if you click on any story link, you get to read its content. Isn't it neat how that works, Sam?

Again assuming there has been no sudden access granted to the paper's archive, isn't it at least a little likely that Team McCain might have paid a visit or two to this archive without bothering the people at the Frontiersman?

Now it's conceivable that not every Frontiersman article about Palin is in the 944 items listed, and that the listings appear to include some duplicates. But remember that Sam Stein told us that "only a handful" of stories were online. That's a lot of fingers for one hand, Sam.

Mr. Stein has a bit of explaining to do. Since he is a "reporter," he needs to find out and report how long the Frontiersman's archive has been accessible. Assuming it has been accessible for some time, he then needs to tell us why he gullibly (or not?) let false information travel around the world unanswered for what will probably end up being almost 48 hours -- false information that will remain planted in the minds of those who won't see any retraction or correction. Finally, once again assuming archive accessibility has been present for some time, Stein needs to apologize to Team McCain and the rest of the world for his sloppiness, and consider presenting Arianna Huffington with his resignation.

Update (Sept. 3): In a phone conversation this afternoon, Greg Johnson, Managing Editor at the Valley Frontiersman, confirmed that the VF's archives have been online for many years. Sam Stein's piece at the Huffington Post is still unchanged as of this update.